Hand held sanders come in many sizes and shapes and find widespread use among both professionals and amateur home craftsman. Both manual sanding blocks and portable electric sanders require sandpaper pieces smaller than the standard sheet size. Such sanders require frequent replacement of the abrasive surface as the abrasive material is quickly consumed during operation of the sander. Packages of precut replacement sandpaper sized to fit the particular tool are sometimes available, but such precut replacements tend to be relatively expensive. Moreover, maintaining several different stocks of precut paper (of perhaps several different degrees of abrasiveness or grit) for several different sanding devices is troublesome.
In order to save money, users will often cut or tear standard sized sheets of sandpaper into smaller pieces for use with their sanders. This can prove to be relatively time consuming, requiring careful measuring to obtain the most pieces from a sheet as well as to obtain the right size sheet for a particular application. An incorrect cut or tear may produce the correct size smaller piece for a certain application, but also produce a remaining portion of the sheet not suited to the production of further smaller sheet portions. That is, an inappropriate cut may result in generating increased scrap. It can also be wasteful, as when the sheet does not tear or cut as intended, with the result that the piece can not be used.
Cutting devices to assist the amateur craftsman in cutting replacement pieces of sandpaper have been suggested. Such devices usually take the form of paper cutters, ticket cutters and wallpaper cutters and are not designed specifically for cutting sandpaper. However, U.S. Pat. No. 3,991,992 to Martin and U.S. Design Pat. No. Des. 296,864 to Moulton et al both disclose abrasive sheet measuring and cutting boards with a permanently attached serrated edge for cutting sandpaper. These patented arrangements represent an improvement over the somewhat standard technique of laying the sandpaper sheet along the edge of a table top or other straight edged surface and simply tearing along that surface, but in either case, the tendency for paper to tear along a line other than that of the surface still results in the frequent generation of scrap pieces.